Respect one another within the group: all members have
something important to contribute.
Concentrate on learning the material and solving the
problems. Social talk is allowed but should not dominate.
Everyone must fulfill their obligations as a member of the
group.
Each person must help to solve the problem. If someone is not
helping the other group members need to encourage that person to
contribute.
Each person has a role in the group beyond problem-solving.
These roles help to enable communication with the teacher and the
rest of the class.
Never sit passively and let one person do all the work; to
get a good participation grade everyone must contribute.
Do not split up the work! Everyone works every problem.
Group officership must rotate: each member of a group can be
any group officer for the first meeting. After that they must
take on another role at each successive meeting until they have
rotated through all group officerships. For example, if you are
the Observer at the first meeting then you cannot be the Observer
again until you have been each of the other officers exactly
once.
Grades for group work are based on several things:
Each student’s paper shows what the group did in class
and will be checked off as the work is completed.
I will make observations of each group as I visit it and
write down notes. This is a class participation grade.
Each time a student is a presenter they will receive a
grade.
Group Officer Roles
Leader:
Serves as the spokesperson for the group with the teacher
Selects problems on non-sequential problem sets and reads
them aloud; decides how to proceed with the problem
Assigns tasks to group members (singly or in pairs) and
ascertains when consensus has been reached on the correct method
and solution to a problem
Observer:
Asks other members (and his/her self) whether the solution to
a problem makes sense: can each member say that they could do a
similar problem again without help?
Notes problems with communication
Judges the utility of each problem regarding how well it
helps students to understand the conceptual material
Reports problems as they occur verbally to the instructor
and/or
Fills out a form evaluating the quality of the group-work
exercises
Presenter:
Serves as the sole public speaker on all occasions when the
group is asked to present its solution to a problem
Explains a result and demonstrates problem solving methods to
the class
Each time you serve as the presenter you will receive a grade
for how you did. This is your grade alone.
Important note: for those who may be subject to stagefright,
just remember that everyone else in the class is expected to do
exactly what you do when you present a problem.
Other Member:
Contributes to solving all problems.
Records problem solving steps and results on their
paper.
Helps to keep the group working and working well.
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Participation
The teacher will observe you during group work and assign you
an individual grade. Your teacher will classify your
participation as follows:
Professional(100%)
this member always contributes to the group in a positive manner
and is always polite and productive.
Journeyman(90%)
this member does the work, mostly helps the group and is
usually positive, polite, and productive.
Amateur(84%)
this member does the work but is sometimes impolite,
nonproductive and/or negative and may not work with the
group.
Hacker(70%)
this member goes their own way but gets some work done and may
contribute to some small degree.
Wanna-be(60%)
this member tries sometimes but is mostly uncooperative,
nonproductive, impolite and/or negative.
Anarchist(25%)
this member doesn’t buy in to the whole “group
thing”, makes essentially no contribution to the group and
gets practically no work done